Why teams need this
Every salesperson sells their own way, with different pitches, qualifying questions and follow-up habits. The best seller's methods stay in their head, new hires take months to learn by watching, and the manager can't tell what is working. The group has individual targets but no shared way of working.
Team versus working group
Katzenbach and Smith (Harvard Business Review, March–April 1993) define a team as "a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable". Participants test whether their sales group is a team or just a working group. The article's cases include a seven-person group of "rebel railroaders" at Burlington Northern that built a multibillion-dollar piggybacking rail business.
What effective teams share
Google's Project Aristotle studied 180 teams, 115 engineering teams and 65 sales pods. It ranked five dynamics: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. It concluded that what mattered was "less about who is on the team, and more about how the team worked together". Participants score their own team on all five, and the playbook is their "structure and clarity" step.
Team development stages
Tuckman's 1965 stages are forming, storming, norming and performing. Participants identify where their team is. They also expect some "storming" when top performers are asked to follow a shared standard.
Group work and role-play
Teams draft one section of their own playbook, for example qualification criteria, from the habits of their best sellers. Then they role-play a team meeting where a top seller resists the shared standard, and practise getting buy-in without forcing it.
Exercises use your sales stages, CRM, products and team structure, so the draft playbook is ready to take back to work.
